


An Eternity of Snow

by malchik



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-12 03:38:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9053692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malchik/pseuds/malchik
Summary: Katsuki Yuuri, one of Japan's finest figure skaters, collapses after his short program in the Sochi Grand Prix Final. He is diagnosed with a fatal heart condition, and only has a few months left to live. Enter Victor Nikiforov, a man who can save his life.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta-read. It's been a while since I last wrote a fic, so I know this is very uneven. Criticisms are welcome. :))))

A flick of the wrist, then the music starts: first, a glorious entrance of strings, and then the soft sound of the flute beneath the barrage of the violins. The stream of music: liquid to his ears, gasoline to his body. A smooth swaying of the hips. The soft crunch of the ice. Perfect flow of his arms.

The throng of people are way beyond his reach, silent and unmoving, like marble statues, as if they are the final residents of Pompeii, preserved to their deaths. Yuuri hums to calm himself. He spins, and the lights begin to blur. Every eye is on his figure, lightly clothed and designed to look glamorous, more graceful while he spins on the ice. He glides, spread-eagled. His pulse quickens in anticipation.

His first jump in the program.

He lands the triple axel without difficulty. The cheers buzz in his ears, not exactly drowning his program’s music, but like static noise from a television set turned on at a silent Sunday morning. _A seductive step sequence_ , he could imagine the commentators saying. Yuuri particularly likes the British ones. They always seem so enthusiastic with regards to the sport.

His heart falters for a bit, but he doesn’t know why.

He settles on one place and executes a camel spin. The lights blur again. The faces of the spectators warp with one another, a ruined watercolor painting. A psychedelic centerpiece. Yuuri brings his right leg down, and skates to another spot on the ice.

His thoughts are not exactly stormy that day. _It must be a good day_ , he thinks.

He miraculously lands his quadruple Salchow. The crowd screams their lungs off.

Suddenly: a tightening in his chest he wants to claw out. A pile driver banging, cracking a circle on his ribs, for the construction of a pincushion heart. He needs more air.

Yuuri pictures different colors of roses: red, white, pink. Wild roses, growing in his chest, nurtured by his blood to fruition, invading for space. The trailing stems wrap around his heart, a parasite clinging to its primary life source.

He wobbles through his Ina Bauer.

Yuuri spins, and spins, and spins. He spins as hard as he could to throw the parasite away from his chest, but the plant holds on.  The stems tighten around his heart.

Triple toe loop.

The thorns scratch the surface of the muscle, but they do not pierce through.

Yuuri gasps and steps off his landing.

He finishes his short program with a lack of flourish.

 _It must be a good day_ , he still thinks. _The kiss and cry is that way_.

He takes a deep breath and drags his weight outside the rink. He realizes it too late. The thing growing out of his chest is not just the shrub any longer.

Mount Vesuvius. Silent for decades, alive once more.

The thorns prick his left atrium.

And Vesuvius decides to erupt.

The explosion is silent. No smoke. But the red, syrupy blood flows. The roses bloom to a dark red color. The static noise from the television set growls louder. He remembers the show he watched one lazy Sunday morning about tigers. The roars have been comforting, but this ocean of noises around him isn’t.

Yuuri collapses on the ice, eyes flitting, and consciousness fading. He waits for the lava to swallow him whole. Just like Pompeii. Just like the audience, silent and unmoving like marble statues, eyes on his sprawled form.

He waits for the lava to scorch his body, but he only feels the bite of the cold.

 

The doctors say he only has more or less three months left to live.

 _Myocardial rapture_ , they say. He collapsed after his short program because his heart literally burst.

But the rapture is not exactly the reason why he’ll die helpless around March next year. The bursting of the heart is only an effect. Something the doctors expect someone with his condition to exhibit one day. A consequence. The beginning of the end.

Yuuri clams up and decides to leave the talking to Coach Celestino.

 

Yuuri learns that he got last place in the Grand Prix Final a day later. As expected.

His hospital room has a television on an elevated part of a wall, but he has no plans of turning it on. He can’t understand Russian anyway. He removes the two AA batteries from the remote control and shoves them under his bed. His phone is on airplane mode. His coach can take his calls for him, just for the moment.

He spends the day looking at the scenery outside.

 

Third day at the hospital.

Yuuri smiles at the nurse laying out his lunch, but it’s the hollow kind. A substitute for a ‘thank you’ when words do not want to leave your lips.

The food is bland, yet Yuuri eats everything anyway. He fights the urge to throw up afterwards.

It starts to snow by noon. Yuuri watches the snowflakes fall. He watches the whiteness of the snow overpower the green of the trees.

He still doesn’t know why he’ll die.

Yuuri thinks it doesn’t matter anyway.

 

He finds his body on the shore that night. It’s just him, in his training gear, sitting on a beach. The sea spans right in front of him, calm and reflective. The water shines, a strong clear blue, even though overhead is a gray sky. The sand he is sitting on is damp, as if the yesterday of his dream has brought about a downpour, to clean the slate for tonight’s dream. A flock of black-tailed seagulls flap their wings in the distance, but they never get out of their place in the sky, like thumb-tacked cardboard cutouts in a backdrop for an elementary school play. Yuuri hears no calls from them.

Yuuri sits alone, but he can’t take his mind off the way the spot on the sand beside him is disturbed. A shallow burrow. Someone has taken that spot beside him. He touches the spot, and feels a fleeting warmth travel to his palm. Quite recently, too.

He stands up, dusting off the sand on his clothes. He cups his hands on either side of his mouth and calls for his mysterious companion. Nothing happens. He strains his throat and screams, but no sound comes out. Yuuri trains his eyes to the shore and yells once more. He doesn’t hear his voice and the other man – Yuuri thinks it’s a man – is still faceless.

A movement in the horizon catches his eye. A giant wave, coming at him at an abnormal speed. One by one, the seagulls plummet to the sea, flightless. Yuuri’s hands become clammy with sweat, feet planted to the ground.

 _Just a dream_ , he tells himself.

He wills his legs to take his body away from the shore. He somehow gets the strength to run, and is about to fight his way through the trees when an unseen hand clutches at his left ankle and pulls. He falls on his stomach. Yuuri struggles to his feet, but the unseen force is still there, forcing him down to the ground. The invisible hands turns him on his back, a pair of strong hands holding Yuuri’s arms on either side of his body. He squirms and kicks at the air, hoping to knock some invisible body out of his way. Unfortunately, his feet land on nothing but air.

The giant wave hits the shore, the wall of water casting a shadow over him.

Yuuri shuts his eyes. Before he drowns, two words finally comes out of his mouth: _help me_. Quiet, but the wind carries it still.

The wave stops on top of him. And then everything rewinds.

Once more, he is sitting by the shore, in that same spot where he had been a moment ago. His palms feel the coarseness of the sand, and this time, he doesn’t wonder about the wetness. Yuuri trains his eyes to his right, and there he is, faceless no more: lean, muscular body, short gray hair, and when he turns his head to face Yuuri, he sees striking blue eyes. A cluster of hair covers one of them, but the power of his gaze is just as intense. Yuuri wonders whether drowning in those eyes would be a pleasanter experience as compared to being engulfed by the sea.

The stranger’s lips move. Yuuri cautiously leans in, only to be hit by a strong, musky scent. The other man moves his head closer, and in a low, yet melodic voice, he whispers: “I will.”

 

Yuuri wakes up and discovers the windows of his room wide open, the curtains billowing in the gentle night breeze. For a moment, Yuuri thought he can still smell the stranger’s perfume. He chuckles mirthlessly. _Only a dream_.

He returns to his slumber with the windows still open.

 

Through some form of black magic, Coach Celestino convinces the doctors to release him a day early. A plane ticket to Japan – just one – has already been bought last minute. After the IV needle is pulled out of Yuuri’s arm, Celestino begs him to wipe off the hospital smell his body has adapted. Yuuri obliges with a nod and he doesn’t complain when the washcloth that dampens his skin is ice-cold. His coach gives him a lot of garments to wear to hide his identity during his journey: a thick brown coat, a scarf, and a beanie. For good measure, Celestino dumps in his hands a box of disposable surgical masks.

“Did Mom call?” Yuuri asks. He settles at the back of the van. Celestino is on the driver’s seat. He fastens his seatbelt and starts the car before answering.

“She did. She was crying the whole time.”

“I see.”

The rest of the trip to the airport is spent in silence. For Yuuri, nothing else is supposed to be discussed anyway. There is no more next year for him. His first Grand Prix, and he fucks it up. His first Grand Prix – and his last.

No more competitions for him. A coach like Celestino is insignificant now. Before boarding the plane, Yuuri bids goodbye to Celestino and officially terminates his relationship with him as a coach. All formalities. Both of them are aware that everything ended when Yuuri collapsed on that rink.

 

When Yuuri gets off the train to Hasetsu, he stops hiding. Hasetsu is a small town, and even in his stuffy clothes, someone is bound to recognize him, even after five years of living overseas. Looking around the train station, Yuuri feels his gut stirring. He sees a pair of escalators not too far from where he is standing, just outside the card machines. He sees a scattering of people; the old ones entering Hasetsu, the younger ones leaving it. A soda vending machine on one side of the station doesn’t have its lights on, but he could see from the display that there are still drinks inside. He has always thought of Hasetsu as constant; that even as time would pass by, Hasetsu would stay Hasetsu. Five years apparently is enough to prove his thoughts wrong.

Hasetsu still looks the same, but it is different now. He can tell.

“Yuuri!” a perky voice calls. A tall woman with long brown hair and a mole on her left cheek runs towards him, an arm flailing above her head in a wave.

“Minako-sensei,” he says. “It’s been a while.”

His ballet instructor pulls him in to a hug. It’s not warm, but it’s enough. Yuuri settles his chin on her shoulder. “You alright?” he hears the muffled query. Yuuri answers with a nod. He isn’t, but she doesn’t have to hear it from him. She probably knows that much.

Minako breaks off the hug, and when she considers him, it’s with watery eyes. She smiles but it wavers. “Come on, let’s get you home. You must be hungry. Hiroko’s made you your favorite.”

Yuuri looks at the ground before replying. “Yeah. Home would be nice.”

 

His family waits for him by the entrance of the inn. His mother and father welcome him with smiles so wide their cheeks must have hurt. They are both talking at once, their voices an incomprehensible, dissonant noise. Yuuri receives their embrace, light as a feather, and then they back off, and their hands immediately seek each other as they look at their only son. He brushes off the layer of snow on his overcoat.

“How was your trip, Yuuri?”

“It was fine, mother,” he replies at once. A well-rehearsed postmodern play in the works, and no audiences are needed.

Mari stands up beside them, back straight like greeting a very important guest, and eyes conspicuously red. Yuuri eyes his sister’s right hand, resting on her side. Her lips are dry, and her fingers twitch, as if seeking for something that isn’t pressed in between them. Like a cigarette.

Ladies and gentlemen: Mari, the Marina Abramovic of Kyushu. The artist is present.

His head throbs in a dull pain, his peripheral vision slurring, turning into a great big mess of colors. He almost topples forward, almost hitting his head on the varnished floor, but he catches his body with his suitcase. He crouches and cradles his head with his hands. He hears the worry in their voices. Mari’s strong grip slowly pulls him out of his position, and he straightens his back just to let them off his.

“I…May I please rest for a while? The trip’s been long and I…” he trails off, letting them fill in the blanks with the worst thing they could muster. His parents nod and turn on their heels, his father going to the kitchen, and his mother to the storage room.

“Off you go, then. When you wake up, I’ll serve you your favorite katsudon,” Mari says, rubbing a palm on Yuuri’s back.

Tonight’s headline: Yu-topia Katsuki Holds Theater Production to Boost Sales.

“Don’t you want to say hi to Vicchan first?”

“No.” He’ll meet him in a few months’ time, anyway.

Home isn’t as warm as Yuuri remembers.

 

Yuuri doesn’t come down for dinner. Instead, he burrows himself inside a poorly structured pillow fortress on his bedroom floor. A comforter covers his legs. The enclosed space reeks of strong fabric conditioner and he sneezes once or twice, but he stays in place. A bowl of katsudon, now cold, stands in attention outside his fortress. In his hand is his cellphone, still in airplane mode.

He wears out its fingerprint feature: unlocking, locking, and then unlocking again. He goes to his music library in between, deleting one song per browse.

He stops temporarily when his song count drops from 365 to 90.

Three months. Ninety days. Ninety songs. Six days gone.

Yuuri erases six more before sleeping.

 

Yuuri is standing in the middle of a cramped greenhouse. He scans his surroundings but sees no door. It’s dark outside the greenhouse, with the full moon shining a million miles away, but Yuuri can see everything inside the greenhouse clearly. The only things inside are five potted plants, a rusting watering can, half-empty with water, and pruning shears. Yuuri lines up the potted plants in front of him and sits with legs crisscrossed.

 _You’ll all grow, won’t you?_ he asks. The plants do not answer.

Yuuri tends first to the pot farthest on his left. He pulls off the weeds from the soil and then lets the plant drink from the watering can.

Yuuri waits.

The youngling twitches, the leaves slowly unfurl, and the plant sprouts from the soil. Yuuri stands up and watches as it grows up, only stopping when it rises over him by a few inches. He waters the pot next to it, and the plant does the same. He waters the third, and the fourth, until towering him are four plants. Big, looming sunflowers, growing in the dead of night.

He tilts the watering can over the fifth pot. Water starts to trickle from the spout.

“You shouldn’t do that,” a voice reprimands with such clarity, as if not form a dream. Yuuri feels a tickling in his ears, like a feather or an intimate whisper. He turns towards the voice, slowly. He gets a glimpse of the gray hair first, and then the striking blue eyes. He stands outside the greenhouse, right in the mouth of the abyss. His body glimmers, not one with the darkness around him, as if he is the moon itself, so much enamored by a mortal that it has taken the form of one only to see him. But the full moon is still up there, and the man shines brighter.

Yuuri has never seen something so beautiful.

“Look at it,” the man commands in his familiar timbre, “It’s dying.”

Yuuri glances at the last pot. Once the water touches the youngling, it burns, from the leaves, to the soft stem, until the only things left in the pot are damp brown soil and ash.

He shivers. He doesn’t smell smoke. He smells perfume, the same one from the hospital. Not as strong as back then, but still noticeable.

 

Yuuri groggily deletes one more song off his phone. 83 songs left. His neck is sore due to his uncomfortable sleeping position on the floor, and from the cold wind coming in from his window. He climbs his bed and pulls them shut. He must have opened them at one point during the night. _Must be because of that dream_ , he thinks. But he doesn’t know why.

He peers out the window. Heavy snow in the morning. He folds his arms on the windowsill and rests his head on them.

Lately, he seems to have developed the habit of watching things happen outside windows. Not exactly a physically taxing activity like skating, but mentally, it’s a different story. Tires out the mind, until it is numb, and the cogs hardly move anymore. Yuuri does it for the mind-numbing sensation. He watches the snow fall. Slowly creating a world devoid of color. Forming a layer on the surface of the earth so that people can leave behind temporary tracks, or bury anything they wanted to be buried. Like secrets. An unrequited love. Unfulfilled dreams. Life itself.

The knock on the door interrupts him. He gets out of bed and picks up the bowl of katsudon on the floor. Outside the door is his sister, with a new plate of food. She reeks of cigarette smoke.

“You haven’t eaten your dinner?” she asks, her eyebrows furrowed.

“No. Didn’t have the appetite for it.”

Mari doesn’t say anything further, but she takes the bowl, and pushes the hot plate of food in his hands. “Just eat a bit, okay? Three bites. That’s enough. Drink your medicine,” she says before leaving him alone.

Yuuri takes three bites out of one shrimp tempura. He doesn’t eat the tail. He puts the tail back to plate and leaves it outside his room. He swallows his pills dry. They get stuck in his throat. He spends the day tasting the bitter medicines.

 

82 songs.

He eats his lunch. Four bites. He doesn’t swallow his pills dry this time.

His chest hurts in the afternoon, and he faints for some time on his bedroom floor. Nobody hears a sound. Nobody comes to help.

He stands up a few minutes later, as if nothing happened. He watches the snow fall. He doesn’t take a shower.

He eats his dinner. Four bites. He downs his pills. He goes to bed. He doesn’t dream.

 

81 songs. He waits for someone to knock, but nobody comes. He opens the door, and he finds his food already there. One bite. Two bites. He pops his pills in his mouth, then drinks water. He resumes snow-gazing. He’s not yet tired of it.

Dinner is three bites for luck, and a lot more pills. He sleeps at eight.

 

80 songs in his phone, and Yuuri finally comes down for breakfast. His mother and father are in the dining room when he enters. Katsudon isn’t exactly breakfast food, but he asks for it anyway. His mother rushes off to the kitchen. In time, a steaming hot bowl of his favorite food is laid out in front of him. Yuuri picks up his chopstick and eats everything in minutes.

“Mom…can I have one more bowl, please?” he requests, his voice rough with disuse. He doesn’t meet their eyes.

“Of course you can.”

Another bowl served and polished. He lays down his chopsticks; wipes his mouth. He burps, as quietly as he can. “Thank you for the food,” Yuuri murmurs.

Yuuri hears his father chuckle. He finally meets his eyes – red, partially hidden by glasses. Black circles due to lack of sleep. “You better not eat another one if you want to get fat like your mother,” he says. He gives his son a tired grin.

Yuuri lets his lips curve up in a small smile. “Really, Dad. Stop teas—” A hiccup stops him mid-sentence. His hands start trembling, and he grips his knees to steady them. “Stop teasing me,” he barely whispers. Another hiccup. Yuuri feels an aching in his chest, but it is a different kind.

“I can’t help it when my son’s right in front of me, all grown up but still very cute.”

Yuuri cries then. The ugly kind: big sobs, snot trailing down his face, like a dam breaking, a rush of water that cannot be controlled any further.

Hasetsu isn’t the one that’s different. Home is just as warm as before. They haven’t changed.

He’s the one that’s changed.

Yuuri’s dying.

“Dad,” Yuuri calls. His father is right beside him in a flash.

“Dad,” Yuuri repeats. A warm hand rubbing circles on his back.

“Dad, I don’t want to die.” Light kisses on Yuuri’s head.

“Dad, please don’t let me die.”

A choked sob, and Yuuri is engulfed in a sea of arms. Dad’s arms, Mom’s arms, and somehow, Mari’s arms, too.

“I’ll do anything, please don’t let me die.”

Yuuri cries, cries, and cries.

They stay silent, but they listen. They listen to his cries more than anything else.

 

Yuuri is in the greenhouse once more. There are no stars in the sky, only the moon, which appears larger than before. He can see the cratered surface even from afar, an emotionless face glowing in the night sky. The five pots are in front of him, with four of the sunflowers fully grown, the fifth still dead. The watering can is gone, but the shears are there.

With nothing else to do, he picks them up. He brings the handles together, the sound of two blades echoing inside the cramped space. He stands closer to one of the plants, and without hesitation, he cuts the top half off. The flower falls down the floor and rests on his feet. In no time at all, four sunflowers lay by his feet, and he picks them up by their stems. He lets the shears fall on the floor with a loud clang. He holds the flowers close to his nose and sniffs.

There it is again.

Instead of the overwhelming scent of the sunflower is a singular muskiness that he associates to one blue-eyed individual.

_You’re here, aren’t you?_

He looks back, with flowers still in hand, and he sees him, outside the greenhouse, shimmering in the moonlight. He stands far away from Yuuri, with his hands behind his back. The man’s eyebrow lifts expectantly, as if waiting for Yuuri to approach at his own accord.

Yuuri finds his feet moving on their own, one step at a time. The man stares, his eyes speaking of uncharted seas: deep, drowning, dangerous. Exciting.

Yuuri is transfixed, and when the man smiles, his cheeks warm. He doesn’t take his eyes off him; he doesn’t blink.

 _Who are you?_ Yuuri asks.

“Someone you’ll know.” Yuuri hears the words, but he doesn’t see his lips moving.

 _When?_ Step, step, step.

“When the time permits.”

_How do you do that? Speaking without using your lips._

“Magic,” the stranger replies, as if it’s the simplest answer in the world.

 _When?_ Yuuri asks once more, accepting it as if it’s the simplest answer in the world.

“Once you reach me, and let me in.”

 _But how? I see no door._ Yuuri is almost at the wall of the greenhouse.

“Your words will suffice,” he says, smirking. His eyes are glittering.

 _My words?_ Yuuri puts his left palm against the pane of glass.

“Yes.” The man puts his palm up on the other side, until his fingertips line up perfectly with Yuuri’s.

_Once I let you in…what happens?_

“I promised then, didn’t I?”

His smile is reassuring. Yuuri’s heart beats fast. The blush travels to his ears.

_Okay._

“Will you let me in?”

Yuuri smiles, and nods.  _Please come in._

The wall disappears between them, and the man slips his fingers between Yuuri’s. He grips Yuuri’s hand tight. It’s hot to the touch, comforting.

The man's scent bombards Yuuri's senses.


End file.
